Representing Popular Music Stardom on Screen: the Popular Music Biopic

Biopics of popular music stars have become quite popular in the first decade of the twenty-first century, with a number of box office successes and movie awards in the genre. In seemingly offering a glimpse of the ‘real story’ behind the star persona, biopics contribute to individual star images but they also reproduce broader narratives of popular music stardom. This paper offers a brief description of some of the central tropes of popular music stardom before detailing how they are reproduced in four recent biopics. Further, the paper also discusses the popular music biopic’s ambiguous relationship to truth. On the one hand, the biopic must continually assert its truthfulness in order to gain the authority that a biopic needs to be believable and a source of audience pleasure. On the other hand, however, the biopic can never be a ‘real’ truth as it is constrained by both the conventions of cinematic realism and broader ideologies of popular music stardom. In its complicated merging of truth and fiction, we argue, the popular music biopic reflects the socially constructed nature of stardom more generally.